7 thoughts on “Wildfire smoke map, July 8, 2017”

if you look between sacramento and chico you can see the smoke from two new fires ,one is north of bangor which is just south of oroville,was at 2500 acres last in saw..or may have been 2300,not sure,then the second fire which is just south east of beale afb was at 50+ last i heard,but it was moving fast before dinner,i was forced to turn off my radios..drat it anyway.

Until we start calling this pollution what it is, the environmentalist will never get on board with maintaining our forest. These catastrophe wildfires take away life in many forms and endanger us all with POLLUTION!

Be careful what one wishes for. IMNSHO I can see how classifying wildfire smoke as air pollution can easily lead to a “no fires whatsoever” mentality where prescribed fires are rare to non-existent, and the policy is to extinguish all natural fires ASAP, because they all “create pollution”. History has shown that no-fire-at-all approach eventually creates massive fuel loads resulting in massive, uncontrollable, devastating wildfires.

Fire is the NOT the ONLY approach to maintaining a forest. Environmentalists who sue to stop any logging and clean up so they can line their pockets with tax payers cash are highly responsible for these MASSIVE wildfires.

The type of wildfires we are seeing are high intensity fires and they tend to decrease site productivity. Intense burns have detrimental effect. The Pine Beetle has aggressively devastating forests in all 19 Western States and Canada, and the forest floors are littered with fuel to make these fires intense. This allows the fire to burn long enough to sterilize the soil making land unable to produce crops or support life.

Low intense fires do help, but that is not what is happening at present because of the other factors I mentioned above.

Several decades ago Los Angeles banned the use of charcoal BBQs because of the amount of air pollution they ostensibly caused (a 20 lb bag of charcoal makes 1 lb of ash and 19 lb of what?). But how does that compare with what these fires produce? For that matter, does anybody really know what the environmental impacts of these fires ~ individually or in aggregate ~ are, on any kind of valid statistical basis? Short-term, long-term ~ at what altitudes ~ with what persistence ~ and so on? And how does this compare with the things we are trying to control (e.g., car emissions, coal-fired power plants, etc.)? It seems to me that this should be a serious consideration when talking about climate change and the impact of intended (and hence perhaps controllable) human activity, vice the impact of unintended (accidentally-set) or second-order human activity (e.g., the prevention of small fires that leads to truly dramatic large fires), or of non-human activity (e.g., lightning-caused).